What now for the women's movement? Feminist conversations

Cynthia Cockburn reports on a lively day of
discussion at the British Library at which women of the 1970s Second Wave Feminism
encountered a young generation of feminist historians. Debating racism,
reproductive rights, sexualities and much besides, the aim was to imagine: 'What
now for the women's movement?'

Earlier
this year, an archive was lodged in the British Library that contained hours
upon hours of recorded voices - the rememberings of sixty elderly women looking
back on our lives. We were women selected (and who knows how, out of the
hundreds and thousands) as having participated in that upsurge of feminist
activism from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, commonly referred to as 'the
second wave'.

The archive of recordings and transcripts, titled Sisterhood
and After, is the outcome of The Women's Liberation Oral History Project,
a partnership between the British Library, the Women's Library and the
University of Sussex.

On
Saturday, 12 October 2013, ten of us old-timers were invited to take part in a
series of panel discussions in front of a 250-strong audience in the British
Library's conference centre. The invitation came from the History of
Feminism Network, whose members Sarah Crook and Signy Gutnick Allen (both
PhD students at Queen Mary College, University of London) hosted the day.

The
programme was structured around five themes, each addressed in a 45-minute
session wherein two second-wavers held the stage accompanied by two younger
women historians with a research focus on the earlier movement. The latter
posed some questions. We neatly re-shaped them into the questions we really
wanted to be asked (or was this just me?). Then the discussion rolled on with
issues raised from the floor.

Here
I'll touch briefly on the themes and end with a few thoughts about the final
session, on 'work and class', in which I myself took part.

The intention of the
organizers had been to 'both celebrate and critically examine' British second
wave feminism, and the day did indeed hear expressions of sharp divergence as
well as solidarity - no surprise to those who lived through the turbulent
seventies and eighties. The two historic-historians invited onto the first
panel were Catherine
Hall and Sally
Alexander. The history of women, and history as re-told by women, have been
foundational in feminist theory - and not least the works of these two. They
are just as valued, it seems, by today's generation of feminists, represented
on stage by Lucy Delap and Rachel Cohen, as when we first read them.

The consciousness-raising
process in which so many of us, almost half a century ago, began to dig out a
new understanding of our own personal origins and early lives often led us on
to collective self-questioning about women's place in history and our absence from
the mainstream record. Sally pointed out how feminism always asks questions
about the individual, and values the personal voice. So 'history' for a woman
is first and foremost our mothers, our grandmothers. We are the products of our
lived circumstances, and our own trajectories and the bigger sweep of history
are inseparable. Oral history is a natural mode for us therefore - and indeed
in this respect the Sisterhood and After
archival project is characteristic.

'Not
the Church and not the State, women will decide their fate' we used to chant on
those National Abortion Campaign marches, tirelessly renewed each time they
tried to curb our rights. But in discussion with Denise Riley and Jocelyn Wolfe
here at the British Library, we found reproductive 'choice' soon morphing into
'choices'. Yes, we were talking about the contraceptive revolution, defence of
a woman's right to choose, and custody (especially in the case of lesbians),
but also the more ambivalent issues of in
vitro fertilization, surrogacy and sterilization.

Jocelyn had come to
Britain from Trinidad in the sixties. She pointed out how, for black women, the
contraceptive pill wasn't always an unqualified blessing. She remembered being
put on the pill by her GP, without requesting it, as a cure for heavy periods.
That had made her wonder, even then: would this have happened to a white woman,
or is there some eugenic policy at work here? We all remembered Depo-Provera,
the unsafe injected contraceptive distributed and promoted with clear political
intent among the poor black population of the USA, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
From this panel discussion, involving April Gallwey and Freya Johnson Ross,
there emerged a feeling that the rights and wrongs of reproductive choice were
at any moment strongly dependent on the quality of current social, welfare and
health provision, and that today in that respect we might well see ourselves as
moving backwards.

Amrit
Wilson and Gail
Lewis, with younger contemporary historians Nydia Swaby and Terese Jonsson,
comprised our third panel, on race and racism. There were probably few women of
the older generation in the room at this event who haven't got dog-eared copies
on their bookshelves even now of Amrit's Finding
a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (1978), a long-needed work that won her
the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and Charting
the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women(1988), a
warmly-welcomed volume published by Gail and three other authors a decade
later.

Together these two women had broken through the racist neglect of 'race'
afflicting early second wave feminism. But this wasn't just a flaw in the past.
Even now it's hard, they said, to gain recognition of the fact that racism
exists within our movement, not only in the world outside. Race, besides, is
persistently seen as something to do with blackness: 'white' is never
deconstructed. White women can perhaps evade the issue, but as black feminists
they have no choice but to engage. Who will challenge imperialism, who will
address state racism? And in the post-millennial decades, with the 'war on
terror', anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism is rampant. Religion is often used as
a surrogate.

The
session on sexualities was delayed until Beatrix
Campbell could leap the short distance from Kings Cross platform (delayed
train) to the British Library, where she joined Sue
O'Sullivan in an animated account of our loss of orgasmic pleasure in the
course of those years in the 1960s when the invention of the pill and the coil
signalled a shift from clitoris to vagina, from those delightful erotic
non-penetrative fumblings to the straightforward disappointing fuck.

After
this, the afternoon's discussion, though ably managed by Amy Tooth Murphy and
Charlotte Jeffries, like our sexual satisfaction, could only go downhill. But
Sue reminded us how significant had been the publication of Our
Bodies, Ourselves for demystifying our own and each others'
corporeality - despite, as Beatrix added, being a framework in which desire and
fantasy were scarcely sayable. The Women's Liberation Movement, it seems,
looking back, had opened two pathways, one of pleasure - the joyful shock of
falling in love with women, women-as-such, roomfuls of women - and one of
profound anger and pain in a sharper, politicized consciousness of male
violence and sexual exploitation of women and children.

At
the end of this lively day, Lynne
Segal and I were up there on stage as two women who've insisted for four
decades that we are socialist feminists - while, to be strictly honest (and I
think I can speak for both of us in this), having been disappointed by the
rather limited productive space for feminism within actual left organizations.
The questions initially posed by Kate Hardy and Bridget Lockyer, our younger
discussants, had asked: what of women and employment? what did second wave
feminism achieve for the working woman?

Lynne broadened the issue to class, and
spoke of the devastating effects of 35 years of neoliberal
politics, initiated by Margaret Thatcher, eroding manufacturing, decimating
public housing, squeezing welfare, to give free reign to corporate capital,
especially finance capital. With unemployment and inequality soaring, social mobility plummeting,
working-class women and ethnic minorities were hit hardest by the triple whammy
of lower pay, shrinking welfare, and reduced advocacy on their behalf, as trade
union and support networks were weakened. Class differences between women
deepened, as professional women benefited greatly from the mainstreaming of an
aspirational post-feminism, even as the situation of poorer women everywhere
deteriorated. Nothing could be further from the egalitarian goals of Seventies
feminism, with our desire to rethink ‘work’ itself, valuing care, community
building and all that lay outside market forces.

For
my part, I chose to stress how the unequal and exploitative relations of class
are intertwined with and shaped by those of patriarchy (or shall we abandon this
tired archaism and call it phallocracy?). Employers super-exploit women, but
are able to do so because women's labour market position is weakened by its
prior exploitation, unpaid, by men in domestic life and in the wider provision
of social care. For me, socialist feminism thus has to be a project of
resistance to both capitalism and male dominance. Furthermore, and more
contentiously perhaps, I believe that, in engagement with-and-in the left,
socialist feminists need to go beyond economic issues to invite and expect men
to organize, as men with men, and alongside women, against systemic male
dominance - including sexual
exploitation and violence.

But
do we need to be 'in' the left, in order to do socialist feminism? I recalled
how, while struggling on in environments such as local councils and trade
unions, back then, we had invented an autonomous socialist feminism too. For
ten years from 1985 to 1995, Lynne and I had both belonged to a lively European
Forum of Socialist Feminists that drew its membership from Western and
Southern Europe and Scandinavia, and eventually, with the advance of glasnost and collapse of the Soviet
Union, also from Russia and the countries of East and Central Europe.

If the
concluding question of the day was, 'what now for the women's movement?' I
think Lynne and I were saying: let's get a socialist feminist current rolling
again. And let's interpret that as a movement that both engages with existing
organizations and has autonomous
expression; that doesn't renege on 'equality' but insists on transforming
power; that challenges neoliberal capitalism but simultaneously sexism, racism,
nationalism, militarism and religious dogma; and which reaches far beyond the
borders of one country.

Dr. Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist
researcher and writer, honorary professor in Sociology at City University
London, and at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of
Warwick. She lives in London. Her new book is Looking to London, published this month by Pluto Press.

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